Jewel (8 page)

“Sounds great,” Erik said. “What’s the problem?”

“Well, it’s centuries-old colonizer food,” Jewel reminded
him. The hardest thing about running away from home, strangely enough, had been
the poor quality of food the rest of the universe ate. She really missed the
cuisines of her family’s private chef and Luxor’s five star restaurants. “It
may be vacuum sealed, but it’s hardly going to be something we’d consider
edible.”

Erik laughed. “It won’t be that bad. This is really a good
thing. If our holds weren’t pretty full already, I’m sure the captain would
fill us up with those food packets.”

He paused for a moment. “Actually, she may still do that.
It’s sellable after all. I can see her filling the corridors to offset some of
our losses on this trip.”

“Always assuming we find enough fuel to get back again,”
Jewel muttered.

“Better hope we do,” Erik teased. “Otherwise we’ll be eating
these old food packets for years to come.”

* * * * *

They found their first body in the medical wing and it
wasn’t pretty. The cadaver had curled up on its side, an injector lying near
its bony hand. It had had blond hair once—much like Erik’s—and tufts of it
still decorated the skull. Its clothes lay loose against what appeared to be a
mostly skeletal frame.

“I can’t believe you’re making us do this!” Falco
complained. “Skeletons? Tell me where this is covered in my contract.”

“Can I keep it?” Jester quipped. “I’ve always wanted to have
a few skeletons in my closet so people could have something interesting to
learn about me.”

Jewel ignored both of them and squatted down to better
examine the body. She had no medical knowledge to speak of, although her
bioware had a vast database in its memory if only she could access it. Even
without specialized knowledge it wasn’t hard to draw a conclusion from what she
was looking at. The injector was right there before this person.

“Hey, Aurora,” Jester called out. All humor drained from his
voice. “I think you better see this. It looks like this was a family.”

She got up and hurried over next to him to peer into one of
the medical rooms. Inside, a clothed skeleton hugged two much smaller skeletons
against its chest. Or at least, that’s what it had probably been doing. The
whole mass of bodies had tilted to the side so that the arms were no longer
cleanly around the little forms anymore, but the intention—the sentiment of
this person’s act was clear.

Evidently, Jester didn’t feel as enlightened. “What the hell
happened here?”

Jewel looked at him as she picked up her com unit, wondering
if he truly didn’t understand. “Mr. Exec? Captain Kiara?” she called. “We’ve
found some bodies including two children. It looks like mass suicide, although
I guess we need Dr. Brüning to confirm that.”

There was a moment of silence on the other ends of the com,
then Kiara answered her. “I guess when they realized they were cut off it got
to be too much for them.”

“Cut off?” Falco asked. “What were they cut off from?”

Evidently, Erik heard her over the open com-link. “We’re
assuming that this station was isolated after the Armenites invaded Ymir.
Either the people who knew about this settlement were killed in the invasion or
they chose not to tell the Armenites of its existence.”

“Why would they do the latter, Mr. Exec?” the captain asked.
“Ms. Aurora has just demonstrated that this station had children on it. Could
their patriotism really have been so great that they would have preferred for
these people to wither and die out here than to let them live under Armenite
domination?”

It was, Jewel thought, a surprisingly insightful question
from the captain, and for once she spoke without first considering her reply.
“They were hiding something, weren’t they? Something they didn’t want the
Aremnites to have.”

“Precisely my thinking,” the captain agreed. “And whatever
it is, it must have been damn important for them to abandon families—families
with children—here when things went to hell on their home world. Any idea what
that might be, Mr. Exec?”

“No…” Erik’s answer was superficially short, but Jewel would
have bet serious money that his brain was spinning in overdrive trying to think
of what the reason could be.

“You know what else is bothering me?” Jewel asked. “There
aren’t enough people on this station. So far, we’ve encountered four—two of
them children. Where are all the others? No way this station had only two
adults operating it.”

“Another good question, Ms. Aurora,” the captain said.
“Perhaps I’ve been underestimating your talents. I’ve got Mr. Peron scanning
the surface of the moon we’re orbiting looking for a settlement. It could be a
long process. It’s a mighty big world. But we’re beginning our survey by
concentrating on areas beneath the satellites they’ve placed in geosynchronous
orbit. We’ll see what we come up with. In the meantime, you keep searching that
station.”

* * * * *

“Would you look at that beauty?” Jester asked.

Jewel glanced at him sidewise, but he didn’t appear to be
making another of his never-ending jokes.

“That’s an old Meteorite model. You only see them in museums
these days,” Jester said as he hurried forward to run his hand over the side of
the only shuttle in the hangar bay.

It was an old model—Jewel could tell that even without
Jester’s museum comment—and even a cursory look showed it in serious need of
basic maintenance.

Jester ducked under the nose so he could examine the landing
gear. “Wow, it’s really beat up,” he said. “Imagine someone modern like the
Ymirians using one of these.”

“What is he talking about?” Falco asked. “Jester, nobody
understands you. Of course it’s old. This whole station’s been abandoned for
something like twenty years.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Jester told her. “Look at this.
You can still make out the letters on the side of the craft. It’s a Mark XVI.
Who would have believed we’d find a functional Mark XVI in this day and age?”

“I’m not familiar with this shuttle model,” she confessed.
“Can you give me some of the relevant particulars?”

Jester was only too happy to comply, rattling off the
statistics in a crisp fashion that proved there was something besides dead
children he could be absolutely serious about. “It’s an atmospheric landing
craft—orbit to land mass—thus the name Meteorite. This model was first produced
in 423 on Inverness. That’s an industrial giant back in—”

“I know what Inverness is,” Jewel cut him off. “Did you say
423?”

“Couldn’t be,” Falco cut in. “That’s nearly four centuries
ago. Who would still be using such a thing? And where would they even get one
these days?”

Jewel thought the answer to that last question was patently
obvious, but then Falco clearly wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. “They
had to have gotten it from the colonizer. The real question is why were they
using it?”

“The shuttle had a reputation as a dependable workhorse,”
Jester informed her. He was still looking over the shuttle like a child with a
brand new toy. “Some people used to call it Old Reliable. But this one is in
terrible shape. How long do we think this station was here? I mean, didn’t they
know the words ‘basic maintenance’?”

“We don’t know,” Jewel told him. “And we don’t know when
that colonizer out there arrived either. This must have seemed like the
farthest reaches of nowhere when that ship set out. I wonder if it got here
before the Ymirians did?”

“Joke was on them if they didn’t,” Jester said. “Can you
imagine what it must be like to spend three or four centuries journeying to a
far away planet, your own personal Garden of Eden, and find out that the tech
has changed so much since you departed that the world of your dreams has
already been settled by other people?”

“Short end of the stick,” Falco said. “Everyone gets it most
of the time—as far as I can tell.”

“And it’s insights like that that make you such a pleasure
to work with,” Jester teased her. He pressed a panel and the shuttle door
opened. “Look, it’s still got power.”

Falco scowled.

Jewel peered into the interior of the shuttle. It was
dirty—literally—globs of dirt covered the floor of the bay. “But what happened
to all the colonists?” she asked—it wasn’t simply an academic question. After
all, two separate groups of people had apparently disappeared in this solar
system. It would be nice to know what happened to them. It just might keep the
crew of the
Euripides
from disappearing too.

“What do you mean?” Falco asked.

Jewel turned around to face her. “I mean, that maybe I could
imagine the Ymirians despairing and killing themselves when they realized
they’d been cut off from the outside universe with no way to get home again,
but that wouldn’t explain what happened to the original colonists, would it?
They must have wanted to be isolated from everyone else. What other reason
could they have had to come all the way out here? Suicide doesn’t make any
sense for them.”

Jester chuckled. “You never know, do you? A lot of those
early colonists were religious fanatics—I mean you’d almost have to be one,
wouldn’t you, to go careening off through space toward a star system you knew
next to nothing about. A lot of times in those early days they couldn’t even be
certain that the system they chose would have a habitable planet. That’s why
those ancient colonizers had such large fuel reserves and the scoops to harvest
more from gas giants if they needed to. It was crazy that they used to
dismantle their ships in orbit once they found their dream planet, because they
built these things to fly a thousand years or more. They didn’t ever wear out.”

“You really know a lot about this, don’t you, Jester?” His
depth of knowledge and interest surprised her.

“I used to dream about these old ships when I was growing
up,” Jester confessed. “I’d study their schematics and wish I could have been
born on one, soaring out into the unknown stars. Today the cartels run
everything. No one can escape their grasp for long.”

“So what did happen to them?” Falco resurrected Jewel’s
question before she could start feeling guilty again over what the cartels had
done to the rest of the galaxy. “If they couldn’t leave, where did they go?”

Something Jester had said bounced back into Jewel’s head.
“Why couldn’t they leave? I mean, their starship is still out there. If it was
built to last a thousand years like you said, Jester, then why couldn’t they
leave?”

It was a very good question with no immediately apparent
answer.

* * * * *

“Peron has found a habitation on the moon’s surface,”
Captain Kiara reported at their next com-link briefing. Jewel, Erik and
Emmanuel Warrant sat in a chamber off the main Control Room of Brynhild
Station, the open com-link on the table in front of them.

Erik and Jewel had been on the station now for more than
twenty-four hours. The temperature had risen to comfortable levels and they
were starting to fill in a few of the gaps in the vast void in their knowledge
of this system, but as to where the people had gone, they still didn’t have a
clue.

“It’s on an island in that northern sea,” Kiara explained.
“It’s a stupid place to build a colony—terrible weather. I mean, no place on
this world looks very promising for long-term settlement, but the northern sea
looks like it hosts blizzards year round.”

“I wonder why they chose that spot,” Jewel mused.

“Was it a Ymirian settlement or was it started by the
earlier colonists?” Erik asked. They were fairly certain that the antique
starship had reached the solar system a good eighty years before the Ymirians
had opened shop.

“Don’t care and don’t care,” Kiara answered both of them.
“If the settlement had been in a more accessible spot, I’d have sent you down
to see what we could salvage, but I’m not risking a landing craft in white-out
conditions with no idea what the payout might be.”

That made a lot of sense, but Jewel suspected Erik would
disagree for personal reasons.

“Isn’t it worth it to find out what happened to these
people?” he asked.

“Not to me, it isn’t,” the captain told him. “My only
concern is finding the supplies we need to get back to Arch. Since it now looks
certain that we’re not going to find any fuel here, I want to concentrate on
the items we can salvage. That includes taking a look at that ancient space hull
they’ve got tied up to the far side of the station.”

She paused for a moment before giving them their orders.
“Mr. Exec, I want you and the purser to investigate that hull together. I don’t
see any danger. If you find anything worth taking we can arrange for crew to
pick it up later. In the meantime, the deck officer can continue to supervise
the removal of the supplies already identified. Let’s do this quickly, people.
Not only are we behind schedule, but those miners are getting restless in the
passenger compartments.”

The captain disconnected without waiting for questions or
comments.

“I guess there are no motion sensitive lights in here,”
Jewel observed as they stepped out of the airlock and into the colonizer
starship. The name stenciled on the prow of the ancient craft read
Genesis
—a
rather typical and unimaginative name for a vessel in the business of planting
new life on far off worlds.

The ship was as large as she’d expected. The old style
colonizers had to carry with them everything that could conceivably be needed,
not only on the new world, but to get the colonists safely to that far off
solar system. Still, that didn’t mean they’d find anything on the ship that
would be marketable in the present day to people outside of museums and out of
the way backwater worlds.

Erik shone his flashlight around what looked to be a loading
bay of some sort. “So, you noticed that?” he teased. He’d been trying to get
Jewel to talk to him about something other than business since Kiara had first
assigned the two of them to this task. Jewel, on the other hand, had been
trying to figure out why the apparently jealous captain had arranged for the
two of them to be alone together. It didn’t look good to her no matter which
direction she examined it from. What was the captain thinking?

“Come on,” Erik said, “that was a good one.”

Jewel gave in a little on the subject of banter, mostly
because they had to work together—not because she was ready to forgive Erik for
the serious situation he had put her in on the
Euripides
. It didn’t mean
she wasn’t angry. And it didn’t mean she liked him again, even if the corners
of her mouth had threatened to turn upward at his lame little joke. “Perhaps I
should have said I
can’t
see anything in here. I guess there’s no motion
sensitive lighting,” she corrected herself.

The humor in her voice sounded strained even to Jewel—cold
like this starship. Fortunately, they’d correctly anticipated the problem and
dressed appropriately in heavy winter parkas, thick cold-weather pants, gloves
and even stocking-style caps that could be pulled down to cover their faces if
the
Genesis
proved unbearably frigid. That last wasn’t an idle worry. If
basic life support hadn’t been maintained, they could have easily found its
interior frozen over at a few degrees above absolute zero. Luckily, that wasn’t
the case and the ship had been maintained like Brynhild Station at roughly four
degrees.

“Look,” Erik said. “I realize I screwed up and you don’t
want anything to do with me anymore, but…”

“You should have told me about you and Ana,” Jewel reminded
him.

“I see that now,” Erik confessed. “I got too excited about
you. I moved too fast. I hadn’t intended to, it’s just, with everything that
was happening and the discovery that my countrymen were responsible for this
settlement…”

His voice trailed off even as his flashlight stopped
searching the bay around them. He looked lost, confused and isolated.

Despite her intention to keep her distance, Jewel felt sorry
for him. Erik was obviously in pain. She knew that the more experienced man
could be taking advantage of her sympathy, but she felt compelled to reach out
to him anyway. There were a lot of times growing up when she would have liked
someone to care, even a little bit, about what she was feeling.

She stepped closer and touched his arm with her gloved hand.
“This has been hard on you, hasn’t it? These were your people, after all.”

Erik didn’t answer her right away. Instead he started
working his flashlight again, playing it against the walls until he found a
control panel set near the airlock door. He walked away from Jewel—which
hurt—and crossed to the panel. A few moments later, lights flooded the bay.

Jewel mentally kicked herself for reaching out to Erik. The
large loading dock looked cold and barren, just like her heart suddenly felt.
Why did she care about this man anyway? Sure he was handsome, but he’d taken
advantage of her once already. She obviously couldn’t trust him. He was just—

“It is hard,” Erik broke into her thoughts. He wasn’t
looking at Jewel, but he wasn’t precisely looking at anything else either. “I
know it’s foolish, but I keep expecting to find a thriving little community
here—brave Ymirians who picked up and started over after disaster. You know, my
home world is a frozen wasteland too. Ymir was a frost giant in our
mythology—and his body was used to create the world. I just thought…”

Jewel crossed to him and placed her hand on his arm again.

“I just thought—”

An almost sob interrupted him, heaving up from deep in
Erik’s chest before he swallowed it back down again.

Jewel couldn’t hold herself back anymore. She slipped her
arms around Erik and hugged him tight through their parkas.

Erik hugged her back—hard—maybe hard enough to bruise if
they hadn’t been wearing the heavy coats. His voice was a ragged whisper. “Even
after all these years it still hurts so bad.” He choked back another sob.
“Those Armenite bastards came out of nowhere and conquered my planet. We didn’t
even know we had a problem with them. There were no diplomatic incidents—no
unfortunate misunderstandings spun into an excuse for conquest. Ymir wasn’t
even physically close to the Hegemony twenty years ago.”

That sob tried to escape again, but Erik clamped his mouth
around it while he struggled to control his breathing.

Jewel didn’t know what to say to him, so she just tried
holding him tighter.

“I was just nineteen standards old,” he whispered. He
shifted his arms on her back so that one gloved hand cupped her head and held
her face to his chest as if he was afraid she might step back and try to look
at him. “Fresh out of the academy—I was so proud to be on my first deployment.”

He groaned, squelching the sound once more, as if by hiding
it he could deny his pain. “The Armenites brought an entire battle fleet. All
we had to stop them with was a picket of secondhand destroyers—useful against
pirates but not against even a second-class navy. We didn’t even bring them
into our effective weapon range.”

Bitterness cracked Erik’s voice. Even after twenty years of
living with his loss, the memory was obviously still tearing out his insides.
Jewel wondered how many times he’d told this story. Somehow it didn’t sound
rehearsed to her. How much of this story had he even allowed himself to think
about before the discovery of the Valkryie system had dredged it up again out
of the deep recesses of his mind?

She had to say something, prove to Erik that she was
listening, show him that someone else cared about what had happened. “How did
you escape?” Her question didn’t exactly cover all those needs, but it kept
Erik talking so maybe it was all right.

“A really brave merchant captain picked me up,” he told her.
There was a hollow tone to his voice, as if in his mind he was reliving the
incidents twenty years in the past. “He slipped in behind the invading fleet
when every sensible voice in the universe would have shouted at him to run. He
scooped up my life support capsule and maybe two dozen others and we ran for
the Confederacy.”

He shook his head, his chin rubbing against the hood of her
parka. “I was so naïve. I really thought that the whole civilized galaxy would
rise up and right the injustice, but no one cared. The Confederacy and the
League issued protests, as if that would alter anything. The Cartel Worlds
wouldn’t even do that much. Nobody cared about little Ymir. They were all too
afraid of the mighty Armenite war machine to raise a fuss.”

That wasn’t what they were afraid of, Jewel knew. Oh, it was
doubtless part of their calculations, but military might wasn’t what made the
Armenite Hegemony so widely feared. The Confederacy, the League and the Cartel
worlds all had larger navies, even if they weren’t supposed to be as tough
ship-to-ship as the Armenites. No, the real power of the Armenites lay in their
monopoly over armenium—the fuel that made faster-than-light travel possible in
the modern universe. Any nation that seriously opposed the Hegemony risked an
embargo on all fuel sales to their territories. No one was going to risk that
kind of economic devastation over a little world they’d never heard of
somewhere out on the Fringe.

“Damn them!” Erik muttered. “Damn them all!”

By some strange feat of geometry, a wet tear slipped off his
face and past Jewel’s hood to fall hot upon her nose.

Startled, she lifted her eyes to Erik who stared unseeing,
up toward the ceiling, tracks of water channeling down his cheeks.

“Damn them,” he whispered again, less forcibly, still
impotent in his pain.

“Hey,” Jewel whispered. She touched his wet cheeks with her
fingers, wishing she wasn’t wearing her gloves. “I know it hurts, but you
survived. You built a new life for yourself. It’s okay.”

Erik shook his head, knocking new tears off his cheeks.
“It’s not okay, Jewel. If you haven’t lost your planet, maybe you simply can’t
understand. It’s not okay. It’s never going to be okay. They took—”

Jewel stood on the tips of her toes and kissed him. His lips
were cold, but the tears that continued to run over them were salty and hot.

He stopped talking.

“Maybe it’s not okay yet,” she whispered, “but it’s going to
be. You’ve built a new life for yourself, surrounded by people who respect you,
care about you, love—”

This time it was Erik who kissed her, bottling off the words
in her throat as his lips locked desperately onto her mouth. She kissed back
hard, suddenly frustrated with the heavy coats, wishing she could feel the hard
muscles she remembered in his shoulders as she sought to pull him more tightly
against her.

His hands slipped beneath her, lifting her up in the air so
she could wrap her legs around his waist and grind her twat against his body.
The heavy winter pants frustrated her, preventing her from stimulating herself
as she wanted to, but Erik’s soul-wrenching revelation made her want to share
something of herself as well. She couldn’t share her secret past with him, but
if she shared her body again perhaps they really could start to build a better
life together.

Erik stumbled forward, carrying her with him until he bumped
against an equipment locker. The collision almost cost him his feet, but he
spun around and set Jewel heavily on the edge of a storage crate.

Their gloves came off in a frenzy that sent them flying
across the room. Their coats came next, letting the intense cold penetrate to
their torsos even as they plopped the thick garments beneath her on the crate.
Erik’s mouth stayed on hers throughout, greedily sucking at her lips and tongue
as his hands fumbled with her blouse. Jewel felt just as anxious as her fingers
raced to open his shirt and feel his hard chest again.

Her blouse dropped back onto the crate behind her, leaving
only the thin material of her bra to protect her flesh from the cold but Erik
was determined to get that off too. He slipped his fingers behind her, searched
futilely for the clasp. Then his hands came forward again, unhooking her from
the front and covering her hard areolas.

He forced her back on the coat-covered crate as he climbed
up on top of her. His mouth continued to devour hers, while his hands struggled
vainly to cover every inch of her naked breasts. Jewel was having more
difficulty with his shirt, perhaps because she had less experience in removing
it. Erik pressed his knee between her thighs and she opened to him, but the
heavy winter pants they wore minimized any benefit from the pressure he brought
to bear on her pussy.

He pulled up off her mouth and attacked her right nipple,
his tongue snaking out to explore the contours of her cold, turgid flesh. She
shivered, both when he touched her with the warmth inside his mouth, and when
the moist flesh froze again after his tongue had passed.

The contrasting sensations were too severe. Jewel wrapped
her hands around Erik’s head, encouraging him to stop teasing and take more of
her into him. He got the message, sucking her tit between his hot lips and
nursing upon her. The rhythmic sensation reverberated through her body,
creating sympathetic pulses in her neck, her groin and her thighs.

Jewel closed her eyes and let her head drop back, giving
herself over to the pleasure. A moan escaped her lips, and unlike when they
first made love in the shower, there was no reason for her to try to suppress
it. There was no one else on this side of the
Genesis
airlock to hear
her.

The rustle of cloth made her look up in time to see Erik
slip off his shirt. His undershirt still obstructed her vision, but it didn’t
take him long to pull it off too. Unfortunately, that meant pulling his lips
off her nipple, and when he started kissing her again it was once more upon her
mouth. He probed the waist of her outer pants, pushing the winter gear off her
hips and down to her thighs, before returning to her hips again to work on her
uniform slacks.

While Erik was busy uncovering Jewel’s bottom half, she took
the opportunity to explore his chest, running her fingers over the well-formed
flesh. She traced the hard muscles of his shoulders, the clean-cut edges of his
pectorals and the sleek lines of his back and sides, trying to build her
courage to reach lower.

Erik had no such hesitations. He pulled her panties down
with her pants and sank to his knees in front of her.

Jewel froze as she realized what her lover was
contemplating. The crate beneath her ass was damn cold—even worse than the
frigid air tormenting her pussy, but her shock and excitement held the cold in
abeyance.

“Oh, Jewel,” Erik whispered.

He rolled the ball of his thumb up the length of Jewel’s
labia, forcing her to close her eyes again as her whole body shuddered in
anticipation. Moist heat caressed her, pushing back the cold as Erik’s breath
reached her lower lips. Awe tinged his voice. “You are so beautiful.”